<aside> <img src="/icons/leaf_green.svg" alt="/icons/leaf_green.svg" width="40px" /> As we head into the autumnal months of the year it’s a time of turning leaves and brisker air. A time of harvesting, and sharing the fruits of our labour. In that spirit, Sophia Parker has spent some time pausing and reflecting on where we are here at JRF in our Emerging Futures work.
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From 2025, over a period of 5-10 years, JRF Trustees have committed to spending an additional £50-100 million on work that ‘supports and speeds up the transition to more equitable and just futures, where people and planet can thrive’. In preparation for that, we set up 2023 and 2024 as a two-year cycle of learning about what it means to be a funder that’s committed to supporting and speeding up the transition. You can read more about the programme we planned for 2023 here.
And what a lot of learning there is to do. We are simultaneously learning about what kind of work we think needs more oxygen, how best to resource this work, understanding our own position in the ecosystem, and making sense of the kind of team we need to be to do this work well. Across all this work we are committed to learning through doing: testing hunches, refining propositions. It’s been so busy we’ve not shared as much of our workings as we would have liked. This long read is the first of what we hope will be a more frequent series over the next 12 months.
Sometimes I find it easiest to talk about the work we’re doing by sharing my own route into it. Before I joined JRF I worked at Little Village, the London-based charity I set up and ran for 6 years. At one level, Little Village’s model is simple: it’s like a foodbank, but for baby kit. But at a deeper level, we wanted to build social infrastructure so that families could help one another. Our model was designed around reuse, community and connection, and our values of love, solidarity, thriving and sustainability were a direct counter to the divisive forces of consumerism and individualism that shape our lives (for more on this, you can listen to this episode of the LSE’s Changemakers podcast).
I was doing this work in London, a global city where 4 in 10 children are growing up in poverty, and where destitution is rising sharply, especially for families with young kids. Every day, we saw up close how vast economic, technological and social trends are playing out in the realities of people’s lives. Babies sleeping on towels, kids without shoes that fitted or warm coats, mothers so hungry they were struggling to breastfeed their newborns, toddlers living in rooms so small that there was nowhere for them to learn to crawl.
I hope that the Emerging Futures work is an invitation for anyone who sees this injustice and rather than advocating for more food banks, more baby banks, more period banks, says ‘surely, it doesn’t have to be this way?’. Anyone who asks ‘could another world be possible?’
If we are going to take those questions seriously, and answer them well, then we need to focus our energies on building alternatives we can move towards, rather than expending our energy and resources on trying to fix broken systems that are diminishing lives and hurting the planet.
In this place of transition - a place that feels disorienting, confusing, messy - we need to be learning from each other, plural in the possibilities we generate, and willing to let go of those mental frameworks that are no longer serving us well.
I see the Emerging Futures programme as a call to action: an invitation for us all to dream of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, and then, crucially, to start building them. Our role at JRF is to seed, nourish and sustain these futures.
For sure, we need to do that work at the level of communities, as I attempted to at Little Village. But let’s not put the onus on communities to do all this work. We need to look too at the systems and structures that we often treat as fixed and immutable, that combine to reinforce and sometimes augment contemporary patterns of inequality and planetary overshoot. These include land and our relationship to it; ownership, and how that is shared across society; capital and assets and how they flow between people, households, businesses, places and landscapes. They also include governance, regulation and the law, and the way all these things temper some behaviours while incentivising others.
The Emerging Futures programme is about deliberate, iterative future-building work, that’s fed by imagination, rigorous analysis and a willingness to experiment tirelessly. It’s about work that grapples with the unseen economic, social and cultural forces that shape our lives - for example, the complex incentives that shape how capital flows, or the mental models that we use to think about wealth - as well as re-shaping the more tangible manifestations of these systems. This isn’t a bit of fun, some dreaming and brainstorming with brightly-coloured Post-it notes. It is hard, pragmatic work that confronts some of the fundamentals that shape our lives: what we value, how we can live more equitably and sustainably.
When I first started work at JRF two years ago, we talked about this being the ‘deep’ work that’s needed alongside the urgent work of my colleagues who campaign day in day out to ameliorate the worst impacts of poverty on households today. But as time has gone on, I’ve come to see this deep work as just as pressing as the urgent work. It is a false binary.
Last month, as part of a JRF awayday, I hosted a panel with Gemma Mortensen and Joe Brewer, two incredible people who are in the business of building alternative futures. As the conversation unfolded, they told a troubling story of crisis, of how the choices we’ve made have led us to a brink from which we may not be able to return. And yet, even as they described the catastrophe of multiple instances where we have crossed planetary boundaries, they also pointed to the glimmers of hope - the tentative stories that suggest there are possible routes through this bleak present into a better future in harmony with people and planet, even if they are hard to find sometimes.
As they spoke, I felt my body tensing up: a rising sense of anxiety about my children’s futures, a visceral fear of loss and of giving up comfort. Judging from the discussion in the room after, I was not alone. We find it so hard to engage in the scale of change that’s now needed. It reminds me of the Netflix hit Don’t Look Up: it seems that it can be too painful to confront the reality of a world where the current ways of doing things are actively harming us and putting our children’s futures in jeopardy. This state of flux is frightening, confusing, an invitation to cling on to that which is familiar. Keep calm and carry on: surely the worst motto ever for these troubling times.
I’ve noticed another response to panels like the one we hosted with Gemma and Joe: a kind of eye-rolling ‘why don’t you get real’ challenge, exhibited in a recent episode of The Rest is Politics where Rory Stewart dismissed Kate Raworth’s work pioneering a new model of ‘doughnut economics’ as ‘utopian’. We live in a world where pragmatism trumps dreaming; where hopes can be dismissed as folksy, woke whimsy rather than, as Rebecca Solnit argues, a powerful site of action. I am not sure where or how the so-called ‘realists’ get their confidence and self-belief from: how ‘real’ is it to argue that we can chart our path to a future within planetary boundaries, by merely tweaking what we already have? Through doing this work I have learnt that when people invoke ‘realism’ they often mean ‘sticking to what we know’. We need to recognise that the logics underpinning our current economic and social systems are not serving us or our planet well. At some point, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the realists may start to look like the fantasists.